The Allotment Diaries: A Year of Growing and Remembering

'Diary, manual and love letter. An honest, moving, and beautiful book . . . It felt like an honour to read this' NIGEL SLATER

'A beautiful, lyrical memoir . . . I was so moved' AMY KEY, author of ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE

'Incredibly rich. Eagle gives us an earthy philosophy of time through the returning seasons of one small patch of land' REBECCA MAY JOHNSON, author of SMALL FIRES

'Honest and intimate, Thom Eagle writes with tenderness' VICTORIA BENNETT, author of THE APOTHECARY BY THE SEA

February produces an abundance of leeks; May inspires blackberry ketchup. June's courgettes demand endless recipes; August's blight strikes the tomatoes. October sees beans soaking in home-made broth, red wine and barley. December's branches 'die back', yet life still stirs under the soil.

The Allotment Diaries documents a year of growing, pickling and unknowingly saying a last goodbye. Above all, it is a melodious, nourishing month-by-month portrait of the earth we all have in common.

Thom Eagle is an award-winning writer and chef. His first book First, Catch: Study of a Spring Meal was awarded Best Debut Food Book by Fortnum & Mason in 2019, nominated for an Andre Simon, and named one of the best food books of the year by The Times and the BBC Food Programme. He is currently based in Margate where he was most recently chef at the highly acclaimed Bottega Caruso and where he teaches classes on pickling, fermenting, curing and foraging.

Diary, manual and love letter. An honest, moving, and beautiful book . . . It felt like an honour to read this -- Nigel Slater

The Allotment Diaries is a beautiful, lyrical memoir of how Thom Eagle found a kind of secular faith through tending to an allotment. I was so moved by how it shows us the communion and solace growing can offer with the self, with those we love and those we have lost -- Amy Key, author of ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE

An incredibly rich, beautiful and insightful book. In stunning prose that is, at turns, terse, poetic and politically charged, Eagle gives us an earthy philosophy of time through the returning seasons of one small patch of land, an education on plants and their uses (Eagle is a gifted professional cook), meditations on what it is to love (and lose) someone, and much, much more. Writing well about the people we love is very difficult, and with Allotment Diaries Thom Eagle has produced a thrillingly good literary elegy -- Rebecca May Johnson, author of SMALL FIRES: AN EPIC IN THE KITCHEN

An honest and intimate portrait of family, and of the relationship between father and son, The Allotment Diaries is a deeply moving account of loss, grief and growing. Set within the shared space of his father's allotment, Thom Eagle writes with tenderness about familial bonds and the ways in which love is expressed in the absence of words. A disarmingly vulnerable portrayal of unexpected grief in all its shock and muddle, the book is grounded in the small, often invisible acts of care we share, whether digging the earth or preparing a meal. In these quiet, repetitive gestures, The Allotment Diaries reveals how we nourish one another, and how, through tending, we remain connected to ourselves, to each other, and to the earth -- Victoria Bennett, author of AN APOTHECARY BY THE SEA